Welcome to the BI Newsletter
Here, we share stories from across the world of Business Improvement. Our goal is to inspire BI teams to aim higher and achieve more, and share tips and tricks for what works best
Hi and welcome to the BI newsletter!
We’ve wanted to start documenting our experience with Business Improvement (BI) for a while, but it was never a perfect time for this. We ran a series of conference calls on this topic for a while in the past, and it was always great to connect with like-minded people facing similar challenges in their day-to-day work. So we’ve finally decided to start doing it more regularly, in the form of a proper newsletter.
There are many benefits to the newsletter format compared to conference calls (for example). Firstly, it is asynchronous, meaning that you can still benefit from the materials even if you can’t join at the specified time when a conference call is happening. Secondly, you can take as long (or as little time) as you need to process the material. You are not at the mercy of the presenter’s pace and are fully in control. Thirdly, you can engage more properly, leaving comments and having a discussion after reading the article (there is a comments functionality below).
In general, we would like this newsletter to be as useful to the broader BI community as possible. Therefore, we would really appreciate your engagement. Do leave us a like if you liked something. Do tell us in comments what it is you liked, or what you disagree with. And do forward the newsletter to others you know, who might also benefit from reading it.
One other request is that you let us know what topics you want us to cover next. We have our own list of topics, but it is just our guess of what you (the reader) might find useful. But there is no substitute to the reader actually telling us directly what they want to find out more about. So please, don’t be shy, reach out and tell us! This will make this newsletter a much better resource for everyone involved.
In the meantime, below is a description of what you can expect from our newsletter. This is our current vision of what we think would be useful. It might change in the future, but for now, this is what we are aiming at.
1. Best practices
BI is not an easy function to master. There are typically no good manuals you can study, and no step-by-step guides you can follow. And even if you find them, they often don’t quite suit your exact situation and context.
And so the best you can go by are principles that seem to have worked elsewhere. You can extract them from the way Toyota does Lean Production. Or from the way that General Electric approached Continuous Improvement. Just be mindful of the risks of following successful examples from elsewhere too literally. You might end up creating a lot of empty process, but achieving nothing as the result.
We will be sharing some additional best practices here, to help you know what else has been tried and tested elsewhere. You can then decide what to do with them. If they work for you, we will have achieved our objective.
2. Success stories
Everyone needs a little inspiration. BI can be a lonely profession. You’re not quite part of core business teams. And you’re also not quite a purely functional organisation either. You sit somewhere in-between. And it’s easy to feel like an outsider in a situation like that.
To avoid getting demotivated, you need some success stories. You need to know that you’re not alone in what you’re doing. That there are others in similar boats as you, who have figured out how to deliver results despite all of the challenges. You can learn a great deal from their experience.
But more importantly, their experience can also inspire you. Copying somebody else’s journey blindly rarely works. But getting inspired and forging your own path often does. You just need to believe in yourself and that you too can do it. That is the purpose of these articles here.
3. Tips, tricks and how-to guides
Once you know the big picture and feel inspired, it’s time to get going on your own journey. No doubt, you have your own set of trusty tools that have always done the job for you. But you can also try other people’s tricks. This will help you grow and achieve even better results, than only relying on your existing skillset.
How-to guides can be particularly helpful. Often, you simply don’t know what you don’t know. And it’s always helpful to first see somebody else do what you want to do. You can then follow their example, adjust as suits you, and incorporate their techniques into your own toolbox.
Join us on this journey!
As mentioned before, we would love for you to follow along. It takes time to write good newsletter articles. And we hope the time and effort we invest is going to help someone through this website. We are also not averse to criticism. That is how you improve. So if you see something we can do better, be sure to let us know. Just do it nicely!